French doctors strike over pay

Nurses face off with police officers during a demonstration in Paris

PARIS, France -- Striking French doctors took their demands for better pay to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's doorstep.

Union leaders got within 200 metres (yards) of Jospin's Paris residence on Wednesday as a 24-hour strike by general practitioners and specialists turned up the pressure in the run-up to elections.

"We have come here to demand that the government tackles this problem head on," Michel Chassang, head of the large UNOF union told Reuters.

Police stopped the small band of doctors from going further but further demonstrations are planned.

Three out of four family GPs, as well as dentists, surgeons and ambulance staff heeded union calls for a "Day Without Doctors" on Wednesday, leaving stretched emergency services and medical help lines to cope with the sick.

"After being inundated this morning, we expect three or four times the normal number of calls this evening," said doctor Christian Favier, who heads an emergency call centre in Nice.

The protest comes a day after at least 3,000 nurses marched through Paris demanding higher salaries and better funding.

Doctors' unions want a rise in the base fee that GPs can charge from 17.5 euros (about $15.5) to 20 euros and an increase in the fees for house calls from 21 euros to 30 euros.

In the Rhone region that includes Lyon, France's second-largest city, about 75 percent of general practitioners were on strike, several doctors' unions reported early in the day.

Local officials there, fearing a serious interruption of health services, had issued orders for 90 doctors to be on duty on Wednesday.

Segolene Royal, minister of family and child welfare, had urged GPs not to strike and to return to the bargaining table.

Health Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Wednesday he understood family doctors' grievances but that the French health service remained the best in the world with 10 percent of gross domestic product spent annually on the sector.

He said the government could do no more than mediate between family doctors and the funding body that pays their fees, since the government only has direct control of hospital spending.

The rest is paid via employee contributions to health insurance funds.

"It is not state money. We cannot transfer it," Kouchner told Europe 1 radio. "There is a little tinge of electioneering in all of this, which I don't blame doctors for making use of."

Winter of discontent

France's medical sector has been rocked by months of on-off industrial action but the breadth of Wednesday's strike has deeply shocked a country long proud of its health service.

Jospin, a Socialist poised to challenge conservative President Jacques Chirac in presidential elections later this year, has refused to be drawn into the debate.

He has instead advised doctors to restart talks with the relevant non-government funding body.

But the action is embarrassing for Jospin, who hopes to see his Socialists returned to power in June's parliamentary elections, and having quelled other public sector protests with money pledges, he is under pressure to do the same for health workers.

If he concedes to medics' demands, he risks incurring the wrath of euro-zone partners for relaxing budgetary discipline, something both his finance minister and the country's central bank governor warned against on Wednesday.

If he does nothing, a crisis in the health service could dent his hopes of beating Chirac.

Health service workers' grievances are many, including poor pay, understaffing and lack of public recognition.